Unit 33 - Stop Motion Animation Production

Thomas Edison  Thomas Alva Edison  (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman, who has been described as America's greatest inventor. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the  phonograph , the  motion picture camera , and the long-lasting, practical electric  light bulb . Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park", he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of  mass production  and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first. Edison was a  prolific inventor , holding 1,093  US patents in his name , as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. More significant than the number of Edison's patents was the widespread impact of his inventions:  electric light  and power  utilities ,  sound recording , and  ...

George Eastman  George Eastman  (July 12, 1854 – March 14, 1932) was an American entrepreneur who founded the  Eastman Kodak  Company and popularized the use of  roll film , helping to bring photography to the mainstream. Roll film was also the basis for the invention of motion picture film in 1888 by the world's first film-makers Eadweard Muybridge and Louis Le Prince, and a few years later by their followers Léon Bouly, William Dickson, Thomas Edison, the Lumière Brothers, and Georges Méliès. He was a major philanthropist, establishing the Eastman School of Music, and schools of dentistry and medicine at the University of Rochester and in London; contributing to the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and the construction of several buildings at MIT's second campus on the Charles River. In addition he made major donations to Tuskegee and...

Introduction of Photography Eadweard Muybridge ,  original name  Edward James Muggeridge  (born  April 9, 1830 ,  Kingston upon Thames ,  Surrey , Eng.—died  May 8, 1904 , Kingston upon Thames), English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of  motion  and in motion-picture projection. He adopted the name Eadweard Muybridge, believing it to be the original Anglo-Saxon form of his name. He immigrated to the  United States  as a young man but remained obscure until 1868, when his large photographs of Yosemite Valley,  California , made him world famous. Muybridge’s experiments in photographing  motion  began in 1872, when the railroad magnate  Leland Stanford  hired him to prove that during a particular moment in a  trotting  horse’s gait, all four legs are off the ground simultaneously. His first efforts were unsuccessful because his camera lacked a fast...

Charles Emile Reynaud  Charles-Émile Reynaud  (8 December 1844 – 9 January 1918) was a French inventor, responsible for the  praxinoscope  (an animation device patented in 1877 that improved on the  zoetrope ) and the first projected animated  films . His  Pantomimes Lumineuses  premiered on 28 October 1892 in Paris. His  Théâtre Optique  film system, patented in 1888, is also notable as the first known instance of  film perforations  being used. The performances predated  Auguste and Louis Lumière 's first paid public screening of the  cinematographe  on 26 December 1895, often seen as the birth of cinema. Charles-Émile Reynaud was born on 8 December 1844 in Montreuil-sous-Bois (now a suburb of Paris). His father Benoît-Claude-Brutus Reynaud was an engineer and medal engraver originally from  Le Puy-en-Velay  and his mother Marie-Caroline Bellanger had been a school teacher, but stayed at ho...

William George Horner William George Horner  (9 June 1786 – 22 September 1837) was a  British   mathematician ; he was a schoolmaster, headmaster and school-keeper, proficient in classics as well as mathematics, who wrote extensively on functional equations, number theory and approximation theory, but also on optics. His contribution to approximation theory is honoured in the designation  Horner's method , in particular respect of a paper in  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London  for 1819. The modern invention of the Z oetrope , under the name  Daedaleum ( meaning Wheel of the devil)  in 1834, has been attributed to him. The eldest son of the Rev. William Horner, a Wesleyan minister, was born in Bristol. He was educated at Kingswood School, a Wesleyan foundation near Bristol, and at the age of sixteen became an assistant master there. In four years he rose to be headmaster (1806), but left in...

Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau  Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau  (14 October 1801 – 15 September 1883) was a  Belgian   physicist . He was one of the first persons to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image.  To do this he used counter rotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other. He called this device of 1832 the P henakistiscope . Joseph Plateau 's father was an artistic man with a great talent for painting flowers. He wanted Joseph to follow an artistic career and his schooling was arranged with this aim. After excelling at primary school, Joseph was sent to the Academy of Fine Arts. However Joseph became an orphan at the age of fourteen when his father died, his mother having died one year earlier. A brother of Joseph's mother who was a lawyer, A.M Thirion, took over bringing up Joseph and his two sisters. Joseph had a serious illness around this time and for...

Praxinoscope What is a Praxinoscope? The  praxinoscope  was an  animation  device, the successor to the  zoetrop e.  The Praxinoscope is a typical optical toy from the 19th century.  A Praxinoscope has mirrors in the middle with frames at the side that’s been placed inside a shallow outer cylinder, to see the movement of the animation you have to spin it and look at the mirrors. The number of mirrors are actually equal to the number of pictures so the images of pictures are viewed in the mirrors. The reflected pictures gives an illusion of moving pictures, when the outer cylinder rotates. Below shows how the mirror is placed. How does it work? It consists of a  cylinder and a strip of paper showing twelve frames for animation. As the cylinder  rotates, stationary mirrors in the centre reveal a ‘single image’ in motion. Who invented it and when? The Praxinoscope was invented in 1876 by Charles-Émile Reynaud ...